Well-versed in spy movies thanks to his Kingsman series, director Matthew Vaughn‘s latest spy-filled action-comedy is Argylle. Starring Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World) as Elly Conway, a bestselling author of a series of spy novels starring Agent Argylle, portrayed by Henry Cavill (Man of Steel, The Witcher), Argylle sees Elly wrapped up in the world of real-life spycraft after her novels get the attention of a sinister organization led by Bryan Cranston‘s Ritter. Elly’s novels seem to have touched on the actual dealings and actions of this organization, and they’ll stop at nothing to capture her and find exactly how she’s getting her information. She’s joined on this adventure by Sam Rockwell‘s Aiden, a rogue spy who’s determined to protect her.
The premise isn’t exactly original, an author swept up into the real-world events that inspire their books was done in 1984’s Romancing the Stone and more recently with 2022’s The Lost City, but I felt that early on in the film the premise showed promise. Scenes and characters from Elly’s books intermingle with the real-life action, and there’s plenty of clever editing meshing the worlds together. The early fight scene on the train, while too long, was a brilliant example of this editing, switching between Rockwell’s frantic Aiden and Cavill’s suave Argylle performing the same actions in the fight.
Another early scene, perhaps my favorite in the movie, had Elly using her skills as a writer to have her characters figure out a real-world puzzle at the same time as Ritter and his underlings were figuring it out. The scene is beautifully cut between the three groups (Elly and Aiden, Elly’s characters, and Ritter and his men), and showcases a lot of the cleverness and humor that caught my attention at the beginning of the movie.
Unfortunately, as the movie drags on, that cleverness is pushed aside for simpler gags. What sells itself in the first half as a fun adventure poking fun at various spy movie tropes escalates in absurdity the longer the film goes on, and ultimately, gets lost in it. The second half isn’t all bad, there are a few quick gags here and there that still had me chuckling, but the reliance on one-upping every ridiculous scenario with an even more ridiculous scenario was simply too much thanks to several scenes that long overstayed their welcome.
Along with this, action scenes were often obnoxiously accompanied by too-loud party/dance music which failed to properly punctuate the action on screen, instead coming across like it was chosen to serve an aesthetic that the film was reaching for but never quite attained.
Despite the various missteps, there are fun performances all around the cast, Samuel L. Jackson and Catherine O’Hara were a delight to see on screen in their smaller roles, and Bryan Cranston clearly had a blast playing a cartoonishly evil villain. While they were fun, none of the performances had me caring about what happened to any of these characters. Even Sam Rockwell, charismatic as always, had trouble carrying this movie through its second half.
I appreciated that Argylle poked fun at a lot of spy tropes while twisting a few on their head, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough to save the movie from its own absurdity. With a star-studded cast that clearly has fun making this movie, and an interesting and well executed first half, Argylle is severely let down by a messy and unraveling second half full of one too many twists.
Score: 5.5 out of 10
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